He sells most of his knives, which range from $35 to $65, at gun and knife shows. But he does create leather handles for some. “It’s better than those modern steels which are overly stuffed with ingredients that keep them shiny and glossy and pretty and everything, but it’s basically reducing the ability to maintain it yourself,” he said.īecause his knives are made from a railroad spike, each is a single piece, so there are no components that will wear out and fall off, Schneider said. High-carbon content knives may not be as attractive as other knives, but they are a better quality and they can be sharpened, he said. “Customers appreciate it when they are not overly sharp where they can run them into their palms,” Schneider said. “Medium-carbon, low-carbon content, you can sharpen them as good as the high-carbon but they lose the edge much faster,” Schneider said.īecause oyster knives don’t need to be as sharp as other knives, medium-grade carbon steel works better. Schneider said high-carbon steel, once forged into a knife, holds the sharp edge much better than materials to make mass-produced knives. Medium-carbon spikes are made into oyster knives. He uses railroad spikes made of high-carbon steel to craft utility knives. “They have the right size and weight,” he said. What he read in books about forging steel didn’t help that much, Schneider said. The bearded, affable craftsman is self-taught. So now he works, clad in coveralls, in his outbuildings among a flock of free-range chickens and watched by his small herd of goats. Schneider said he didn’t want to waste the work he had invested in the furnace and other equipment so he took up the hobby himself and soon discovered he liked it and was adept at it. The teens thought they wanted to try it themselves, but Jan-Philipp, who was 16 at the time, and Jonathan, who was 13, soon followed other interests. His sons had observed a blacksmith in Germany who demonstrated his trade to tourists in their historic hometown. Actually I did it for my sons and as soon as I was finished, they didn’t want to blacksmith anymore,” Schneider said, laughing. He designed and built a furnace in a metal barrel, bought an old anvil and a vice. Schneider didn’t move his family to the United States so he could become a knife-maker, but that’s what happened after his two sons expressed an interest in, then abandoned, blacksmithing as a hobby. He and his wife left their restaurant, bed-and-breakfast in the hands of their employees and moved from Herrstein, Germany, with their two teenage sons to a new home a few miles outside of Fairmont. I’m a very analytic and reasonable person. “I really felt an emotion, and I felt at home, only because I was riding over the river. “As soon as I crossed the Lumber River, I felt like a core was cracked,” Schneider said. Later, Schneider came to North Carolina for a visit and for an introduction to the tribe. Schneider made contact with him and his father traveled to Germany to meet him. Many years later, his wife researched and found Schneider’s birth father, a Cherokee Lumbee from Pembroke. When Schneider was a teenager, he learned that his biological father had been a U.S. FAIRMONT - Knife-making was never on Oliver Schneider’s bucket list - nor was living in the United States.īut life had other plans for the German-born businessman and his wife, Krista, who left their home nearly four years ago to move to Robeson County.
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